Profile
Abou Farman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research. Professor Farman is interested in secularization processes, especially in relation to post-humanism, technology and aesthetics. His previous ethnographic research focused on transhumanist projects in the US attempting to achieve immortality through cryonics, mind uploading and biogerentology.
He is now working alongside the Shipibo Conibo Xetebo organizations on projects of indigenous autonomy in the Peruvian Amazon.
His latest book, On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience (University of Minnesota Press) was published in April 2020. His first book was Clerks of the Passage, an extended essay on movement and migration. He is founder of Art Space Sanctuary and founder/president of the Shipibo Conibo Center, NY.
He has taught Anthropology at Bard College, SUNY Purchase, Hunter College and Princeton. As part of the artist duo caraballo-farman he has exhibited internationally, including at corrupt institutions such as the Tate Modern (UK), and MoMA/PS1 (USA), and received several grants and awards, including Guggenheim and New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships.
Degrees Held
PhD 2012, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Recent Publications
Books
2020. On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
2012. Clerks of The Passage: An Essay in Movement. Montreal: Linda Leith Publishing, Inc. (French Translation, Les Lieux du Passage, 2016)
1994. Sexual Artifice. Co-editors, Ann Kibbey, Abou Farman, K. Short. New York: New York University Press.
Academic Publications (Peer Reviewed Book Chapters)
Forthcoming. “Biological Infinitude: The Decoupling of Chronology and Biology”. In The Cambridge Handbook of the Anthropology of Death, eds. Ruth Toulson and Sarah Wagner. Cambridge University Press.
Forthcoming, with Volkan Eke and William Scarlett. “Virtually Spiritual: From Secular Ambiguities to Ontological Opportunities.” Oxford Handbook of Religion and the Body, ed Andrea Jain. Oxford University Press.
2022. “Terminality: Technoscientific Eschatology in the Anthropocene.” In The New Death: Mortality and Death Care in the 21st Century, eds. Shannon Dawdy and Tamara Kneese
SAR /University of New Mexico Press.
2020. “Cosmos.” In Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, edited by Cymene Howe, Anand Pandian. Punctum Books.
2018. “Death and the Infinite: Cryonics as Secular Eschatology.” In Wiley Companion to the Anthropology of Death, ed. ACGM Robben. New York: Wiley
Academic Publications (Peer Reviewed Articles)
“Transhumanism.” In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology
“Mind Out of Place: Transhuman Spirituality.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion. March 2019, Vol. 87, No. 1, pp. 57–80 (2019)
“Measures of future health from the nonhuman to the planetary: An introductory essay,” co-written with Richard Rottenburg. Medicine Anthropology Theory, Special Issue: Measures of Future Health, co-edited by Richard Rottenburg and Abou Farman, 6(3): 1–28. (2019)
"Health Beyond the Carbon Barrier: Convergence, Immortality, and Transhuman Health," Medicine Anthropology Theory, 6(3): 161–185.
"Terminality," Social Text, vol. 31, iss. 2, pp. 93-118 (2017).
"Informatic Selves," Gergely Mohacsi, ed., Ecologies of Care: Innovations Through Technologies, Collectives and the Senses, (Osaka University Press, 2014).
"Speculative Matter: Secular Bodies, Minds and Persons," Cultural Anthropology, (2013).
"Re-enchantment Cosmologies; Mastery and Obsolescence in an Intelligent Universe," Anthropological Quarterly, (2012).
Research Interests
Religion & Secularism, Science & Technology, Death & Dying, Aesthetics & Expressive Culture, Indigenous Autonomy.
Awards And Honors
Guggenheim Fellowship
New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship